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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Will the new war on opioids make patients with pain collateral damage.

Warren Meyer who writes the blog Coyote got it right. He said in part in commenting on Arizona's governor Ducey's announcement of guidelines regarding opioid control:

"Consider that many legitimate users will need more than the legal maximum dosage to control their pain, and thus the issue becomes whether we want to essentially torture innocent sick people by forcing them to remain in excruciating pain in exchange for (possibly) reducing the number of accidental deaths from abusers of these drugs (I say possibly because over the last 40 years the government war on drugs has had such a super stellar track record in reducing narcotic usage)."

CVS Caremark in getting in the act as well with more of their nanny-style pharmacy practices.Their "opioid utilization management" plan includes in part:

This program will include limiting to seven days (the Arizona guidelines mandate 5 days) the supply of opioids dispensed for certain acute prescriptions for patients who are new to therapy; limiting the daily dosage of opioids dispensed based on the strength of the opioid; and requiring the use of immediate-release formulations of opioids before extended-release opioids are dispensed.

Who would know better how much pain pill to prescribe and at what dosage than a large pharmacy-pharmacy management company aided by guidelines from the CDC , an organization in which one is unlikely to find many folks who actually treat patients for pain or anything else for that matter.

If the results of the decades of the war on drugs offer any forecast of the success of this latest surge it may be well be that there will be significant collateral damage to the patients who most need pain control.